Paris in 3 days

The Louvre, first slot of the day. Go in through the Carrousel du Louvre (the underground passage off Rue de Rivoli, by Palais Royal – Musée du Louvre) or the Porte des Lions on the river side — the Pyramid is the handsome entrance and it has the longest queue. Passage Richelieu is groups and members only. The ticket is €32 for non-EEA visitors, €22 for EEA residents, and covers temporary exhibitions too.

Walk out through the Tuileries and into the Palais-Royal: the courtyard of black-and-white columns by Daniel Buren, the arcades, and the quietest garden in the 1st arrondissement. Free, and two minutes from the museum exit.

Lunch around Rue Montorgueil or Rue Sainte-Anne, not on the square in front of the Louvre. Look for a board reading formule midi — two courses for €18–24 — and ask for 'une carafe d'eau', the tap water every restaurant is obliged by law to serve free.

Notre-Dame, with a booked slot. Since it reopened the cathedral is free, but the slot is taken online or in the official app and it is the whole difference between ten minutes and an hour and a half of waiting. The stone has been cleaned to a white Parisians had not seen in two centuries. The towers are a separate ticket, €16 and 424 steps, booked separately.

The Sainte-Chapelle two minutes away (€22 non-EEA, €16 EEA; security can run to half an hour) or, if you skip the ticket, the Pont Neuf and the Square du Vert-Galant — the tip of the island, benches at water level, free.

The Latin Quarter: Shakespeare and Company, the Panthéon from outside, then down Rue Mouffetard. Dinner in the side streets — Rue de la Huchette, with photographs of the food in the window, is the one street here to walk past.

Musée d'Orsay at opening. A former railway station holding the largest collection of Impressionists anywhere; the ticket is about €16, it closes on Mondays and stays open late on Thursdays. Go straight to the fifth floor for Monet, Renoir and Van Gogh — reach them before eleven or view them over other people's shoulders.

Lunch around Rue Cler in the 7th or Rue de Buci in the 6th: a bakery, a cheesemonger, a market and a bench. A 'jambon-beurre' and a bottle of water is six euros and a perfectly honest Paris lunch.

The Eiffel Tower. Stairs to the second floor are €14.80, the lift to the same floor €23.50, the lift to the summit €36.70, and stairs then lift to the summit €28. The stairs are 674 steps, open to the air, queue-free, and the view unfolds gradually — the only drawback is that they stop at the second floor. The tower is open daily 9:30–23:00.

Cross the river to Trocadéro: this is where the tower looks the way it does in every photograph, because it is the one place you see all of it. In the afternoon the sun sits behind it, so come in the morning or wait for dusk.

Saint-Germain and the Luxembourg Gardens until closing (the park is locked at dusk, with a guard's whistle). The chairs in the park are meant to be dragged wherever you want them — that is the rule, not a transgression.

The tower sparkles for five minutes on every hour until 23:00. Watch it from the Champ-de-Mars, from the Bir-Hakeim bridge, or, if you are already in the 6th, from the Pont des Arts.

Montmartre before the tourists. Metro to Abbesses or Lamarck – Caulaincourt (the second drops you behind the hill, so you climb through the village instead of up the steps). Sacré-Cœur is free and open 6:30 to 22:30; at nine in the morning it is silent inside, at noon it is a queue.

Behind the basilica: Place du Tertre before the painters set up their easels, Rue Lepic, the Clos Montmartre vineyard (the only vineyard in the city, seen over a fence) and the Passe-Muraille, a man walking out of a wall on Place Marcel-Aymé.

Metro to Le Marais. Lunch on Rue des Rosiers: falafel eaten standing up, for an eighth of what dinner two blocks away will cost you.

Place des Vosges, the oldest planned square in the city, and the Musée Carnavalet — the history of Paris in a 16th-century house, with a free permanent collection, like every city-run museum here.

Walk from the Bastille to the Canal Saint-Martin, or stop in a café on Rue de Bretagne beside the oldest covered market in the city, the Marché des Enfants Rouges of 1615.

A bateau-mouche at dusk: an hour on the Seine, about €15, leaving from the Pont de l'Alma and the Pont Neuf. From the water you see what the street hides — the lower quays, the bridges from underneath, and Notre-Dame from the river.